29. Everly #2
Atlas hits it anyway. Hits the next one.
Each crack of him buys a half-step and costs him a breath, and under the storm I taste the clean cold nothing of Ren, chilling the air a hand's width around his own spilled blood so the dark moves a beat slow.
They're close. Glass and stone and a man grunting through his teeth.
They are not close enough, and the Well between us makes sure I can't feel how badly they're already cut.
One of the constructs breaks off the stair-fight and comes for me.
I don't decide to move—my body decides, the way it decided to launch itself at Atlas a year ago, before my mind catches up.
The thing crosses the open floor jointless and silent and swings a fist of shaped nothing at the place my head is.
I drop. My hip hits the cold stone hard enough to white out my vision for a half-second.
I roll. The fist comes down where I was and the floor takes it with a sound like a struck bell.
The cold coming off the thing hits me so hard my breath locks.
I scramble up. There's nowhere to put a defense.
My first reach closes on empty, blood-sense finding nothing in the thing to hold, and there's no time to braid the other three before it swings.
Then a fork of Atlas's lightning finds it across the chamber, white enough to blind, ozone and thunder arriving a heartbeat behind.
The construct stiffens mid-swing, loses its shape against the wall, has to find itself again. The gap that opens is two seconds wide.
I take it. I'm already three strides off course and I have to fight back toward the platform, ribs aching where the floor caught me, breath sawing.
At the throat of the stair, the only door out, Felix has fallen back to hold it—not winning, holding, because Felix never fights to win; he fights to keep one exit open, and I know without looking that he's planted in that gap working the odds on a thing he will not say out loud—how many of us climb back up these stairs, against how many don't.
And I know the odds are bad, because if they were good he'd be saying so. He'd be calling it across the chamber with a card walking knuckle to knuckle and that bright awful grin. The silence from his direction is the loudest thing he's ever told me.
And somewhere in the dark, doing the quiet, uncountable thing she does, is Brittany.
I can't find her anywhere, which is exactly how I know she's working.
Brittany is never where the eye goes. She's in the seam beside it, doing the small exact thing nobody will be able to point to later and say that, that's what she did.
Helena is at my shoulder.
She came down with me. Kept pace the whole black descent, all her long years right there at my elbow, steady when I wasn't. But she's stopped now.
She's gone very still—stiller than the fight should allow, stiller than a person stands when shadow chains are tearing loose thirty feet away—and when I glance at her, the look on her face isn't fear and it isn't fight.
It's something I don't have a word for and don't have a breath to find one.
She's staring at the Well the way you'd stare at a person you knew a long time ago and buried and never expected to see again.
Her mouth has gone soft and strange. Her hands have come halfway up, palms drifting toward each other in front of her chest, like the start of something older than prayer.
I mark it. Something is wrong with Helena.
Something is wrong about how calm she is, about why she came all the way down instead of stopping at any of the doors that would have kept her safe.
And I tuck it into the drawer with everything else I can't afford to open right now, the drawer that has been filling all year and is, tonight, completely full.
And the thread is almost gone.
That's the part that hollows me out from the inside.
This deep, this close to the Well, the bond between us is drawn down to nearly nothing—the Well drinks it, Ren told me it would, the way it drinks anything that crosses its lip—and so even with all four of them in this chamber, even with Callum thirty feet to my left and Atlas and Ren clawing up the stair and Felix in the door, I can't feel them.
Not the warmth of them. Not the second heartbeat I've slept against for nine months, the one that arrives from outside my own body and doubles up under my ribs.
The thread between us has gone thin as a single hair and the chamber is pulling it thinner, and I am standing in a room full of the only people I'd die for and I am more alone than I have been since the September morning I drove a beat-up Honda into this place with a Tupperware of cookies and an optimism that could fill a room.
I square my shoulders anyway. Because that's what I do.
Okay, I tell myself, the way I tell myself everything too big to pick up whole. Okay. Nell first. The Well second. You can fall apart on the way back up.
I take a step toward the platform.
Catalina lets me. That's the worst of it—she lets me, lifts one hand a little off her working and waves me on, gracious as a hostess showing me to my seat, because she knows how this ends and she is in no hurry at all.
Every step I take toward that girl on the stone is a step she planned for me to take.
She is letting me run because the running is part of the working.
I am a string in her chord and she is waiting for me to ring.
"Go on," she says. "She's still breathing. For the moment, that's down to you."
The last ring slides home.
I feel it lock—the whole chord of her working snapping shut, finished, a pressure that arrives behind my eyes and shoves, hard enough that my ears ring and the metal taste turns to copper and salt at the back of my throat—and the air above the Well tears.
It tears the way skin tears. A seam splits in the dark over the wound, lips of nothing peeling back wet and slow, and the cold that breathes out of it is a different cold than the chamber's, older, the cold of a thing that has been hungry for a hundred years and is about to be fed.
My grimoire lurches against my ribs like it wants to crawl out of me and away.
Every hair on my body lifts. Some animal part of me that has nothing to do with magic or strategy or being still here just wants to run the other way, up, out, toward any light at all.
And out of the seam pour the chains—not metal, Mors, shadow drawn into long jointed ropes of it, the same dark that scattered into faceless soldiers in the Reliquary now braided into one thing with one purpose, and the purpose is the girl on the stone.
They climb up out of the wound slow and certain, as certain as her mother has been certain all along, and the first of them finds Nell's ankle and closes, and her body arches off the stone, and the edges of her go thin, go translucent, like she's being drawn down into the Well a thread at a time before the Well has even properly taken her.
She doesn't scream. She's too far gone to scream.
And I'm still three strides away, with a girl coming apart in front of me and a working built around a year of my life and the only people I love bleeding out behind me where I can't feel them.
Three strides.
I run.